Why Do People Think Individuals in Poverty Are Less Vulnerable to Harm?: Testing the Role of Intuitions About Adaptation.

People often falsely believe that individuals from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds are less harmed than those from higher SES backgrounds by a wide range of negative events. We report three studies (total N = 1,625) that provide evidence that this "thick skin bias" emerges at least in part because people overgeneralize otherwise accurate intuitions about adaptation. Across studies, participants accurately intuited that people adapt to psychophysical experiences (e.g., brightness, weight, and volume) but also inaccurately intuited that people similarly adapt to life hardships that actually tend to exacerbate the harm of future negative events. Experimentally decreasing the salience of psychophysical adaptation intuitions reduced the thick skin bias, suggesting a causal link between these adaptation intuitions and the belief that people in poverty are less vulnerable to harm and underlining the importance of studying how biased beliefs about the effects of poverty may perpetuate inequality.

Choice Set Size Shapes Self-Expression.

Across six studies (total N = 3,549), we find that participants who were randomly assigned to choose from larger assortments thought their choices were more self-expressive, an effect that emerged regardless of whether larger sets actually enabled participants to better satisfy their preferences. Studies examining the moderating role of choice domain and cultural context show that the effect of choice set size on perceived self-expression may be particular to contexts in which choices have some initial potential to express choosers' identities. We then test novel predictions from this theoretical perspective, finding that self-expression mediates the effect of choice set size on choice satisfaction, the likelihood of publicly sharing choices, and the perceived importance of choices. Together, these studies show that choice set size shapes perceived self-expression and illustrate how this meaning-based theoretical lens provides both novel explanations for existing effects and novel predictions for future research.

People think the everyday effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are not as bad for people in poverty.

Many of the everyday restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., lockdowns, being apart from loved ones) are even worse for those with fewer financial and material resources, but a series of experiments (total N = 1,452) suggests that people think the opposite. Indeed, participants consistently displayed a "thick skin bias," whereby they perceived effects of the pandemic such as sheltering at home or remaining apart from loved ones as less harmful for people in poverty. Directly providing information that contradicted this misguided stereotype reduced, but did not completely reverse, the thick skin bias. A failure to understand the full impact of the pandemic for those with the fewest resources may perpetuate and exacerbate inequalities during and after this unprecedented global crisis, making the identification of strategies to counteract biased understandings of poverty a pressing priority for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The framing of decisions "leaks" into the experiencing of decisions.

We connect Bermúdez's arguments to previous theorizing about "leaky" rationality, emphasizing that the decision process (including decision frames) "leaks" into the experience of decision outcomes. We suggest that the implications of Bermúdez's analysis are broadly applicable to the study of virtually all real-world decision making, and that the field needs a substantive and not just a formal theory of rationality.

Balancing the Freedom-Security Trade-Off During Crises and Disasters.

During crises and disasters, such as hurricanes, terrorist threats, or pandemics, policymakers must often increase security at the cost of freedom. Psychological science, however, has shown that the restriction of freedom may have strong negative consequences for behavior and health. We suggest that psychology can inform policy both by elucidating some negative consequences of lost freedom (e.g., depression or behavioral reactance) and by revealing strategies to address them. We propose four interlocking principles that can help policymakers restore the freedom-security balance. Careful consideration of the psychology of freedom can help policymakers develop policies that most effectively promote public health, safety, and well-being when crises and disasters strike.

Narrow prototypes and neglected victims: Understanding perceptions of sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment is pervasive and has adverse effects on its victims, yet perceiving sexual harassment is wrought with ambiguity, making harassment difficult to identify and understand. Eleven preregistered, multimethod experiments (total N = 4,065 participants) investigated the nature of perceiving sexual harassment by testing whether perceptions of sexual harassment and its impact are facilitated when harassing behaviors target those who fit with the prototype of women (e.g., those who have feminine features, interests, and characteristics) relative to those who fit less well with this prototype. Studies A1-A5 demonstrate that participants' mental representation of sexual harassment targets overlapped with the prototypes of women as assessed through participant-generated drawings, face selection tasks, reverse correlation, and self-report measures. In Studies B1-B4, participants were less likely to label incidents as sexual harassment when they targeted nonprototypical women compared with prototypical women. In Studies C1 and C2, participants perceived sexual harassment claims to be less credible and the harassment itself to be less psychologically harmful when the victims were nonprototypical women rather than prototypical women. This research offers theoretical and methodological advances to the study of sexual harassment through social cognition and prototypicality perspectives, and it has implications for harassment reporting and litigation as well as the realization of fundamental civil rights. For materials, data, and preregistrations of all studies, see https://osf.io/xehu9/. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Scholarly Merit in a Global Context: The Nation Gap in Psychological Science.

Psychologists from the United States are extremely prominent in psychological science, publishing more articles and receiving more citations than researchers from other nations. In this brief article, I review some previous research on this "nation gap" in psychology and highlight relevant data from journals published by the Association for Psychological Science. I then discuss some possible explanations for the nation gap and touch on some of its implications for thinking about scholarly merit and scientific eminence. I hope that the research and data discussed here will stimulate further consideration of the role of author nationality for both judgments of scholarly merit and psychological science more generally.

Face-ism and Objectification in Mainstream and LGBT Magazines.

In visual media, men are often shown with more facial prominence than women, a manifestation of sexism that has been labeled face-ism. The present research extended the study of facial prominence and gender representation in media to include magazines aimed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) audiences for the first time, and also examined whether overall gender differences in facial prominence can still be found in mainstream magazines. Face-ism emerged in Newsweek, but not in Time, The Advocate, or Out. Although there were no overall differences in facial prominence between mainstream and LGBT magazines, there were differences in the facial prominence of men and women among the four magazines included in the present study. These results suggest that face-ism is still a problem, but that it may be restricted to certain magazines. Furthermore, future research may benefit from considering individual magazine titles rather than broader categories of magazines, given that the present study found few similarities between different magazines in the same media category--indeed, Out and Time were more similar to each other than they were to the other magazine in their respective categories.

Erratum: Taking perspective the next time around. Commentary on: "Perceived perspective taking: when others walk in our shoes".

[This corrects the article on p. 941 in vol. 106, PMID: 24841098.].